Until this new paper and implementation by Emerson et al., there were no widely available pairs plots that accommodated both numerical and categorical fields. ***Update 3/29/2013: ggpairs in the GGally package has been around since 2010***. A browse through the R Graph Gallery confirms this (as of 1/30/2013). See here too: a post on the Quick-R blog. I had been working on such a plot when I discovered the above article. Hence, I'm using this post to share my work, which I will probably abandon in favor of the above.

Any number of statistical graphics might be used instead of a scatterplot for numeric/numeric pairs; maybe a hexbin plot. A sieve plot or an association plot might be used as an alternative to the mosaicplot for factor/factor pairs. A beeswarm boxplot plot might be used in place of side-by-side boxplots for numeric/factor pairs.

Here was my provisional version of the generalized pairs plot, which I had called an 'association matrix plot':

Below are several association matrix plots generated by the above function (i.e., pairsdf) for data sets found in the MASS package. When there are many fields, I recommend using three to four square inches per plot.

It's easy to see that the coop data set describes a simple factorial experiment.
However, the Rabbit data clearly arose from a more complicated experiment.